Current AffairsRestorers to bone up on skills for Kutná Hora ossuary makeover

Containing thousands of human bones arranged in various shapes, including a
chandelier and coat of arms, an ossuary outside the Central Bohemian town
of Kutná Hora is perhaps the Czech Republic’s most ghoulish tourist
attraction. However, the “bone church” now faces extensive repair work
– raising worries over how to reassemble some formations afterwards.

Photo: CTK
Every year the ossuary in the basement of a Roman Catholic church in Sedlec
on the outskirts of Kutná Hora draws upwards of quarter of a million
tourists from around the world.

It is a macabre spot, housing the bones of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000
people who died during the mid-14th century Black Death and the Hussite
Wars almost 100 years later.

The bones are arranged into all kinds of formations, from the crest of the
local aristocratic rulers the Schwarzenbergs to the signature of woodcarver
František Rint, who the family hired to create the eerie designs in the
1870s.

Today the Sedlec “bone church” is suffering from structural faults
and, administrators say, requires extensive repairs. The first phase,
focused on the roof and its frame, will get underway in July.

Photo: CTK
A subsequent stage will be more complicated. The biggest structures in the
basement, four bell-shaped mounds of bones, have to be temporarily removed
as they are adjacent to supporting columns in need of repair.

Sedlec parish representative Petr Blažek describes what will happen.

“We have to take those pyramids apart completely, one after the other,
and to document, layer by layer, how the pyramids are composed. We will
then respectfully remove the bones and repair those spaces, safeguarding
the columns structurally, plastering the walls and implementing measures
against rising damp, and so on. Then we will return the bones, layer by
layer, to the form they are in today.”

Unsurprisingly, there are concerns that reassembling the large mounds of
bones in their original shape could prove a huge challenge.

Photo: CTK“At this moment we actually don’t know what is holding the bones
together in those pyramids, if there is a supporting system holding them
together – we just don’t know. So that makes it more complicated for
us. We do have concerns. But we believe that it is necessary to undertake
these repairs. If we didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before nothing
remained of this important historical landmark. It would fall into ever
greater disrepair.”

The good news for would-be visitors is that the Sedlec ossuary will remain
open when the repair work is going on in the next couple of years.

Mr. Blažek says visitors will be able to view the complicated process,
though some parts will be temporarily off-limits for safety reasons.